Detroit Tigers: Rebuilding Or Just Shedding Salary?
Multiple media reports have taken the report from Detroit Tigers GM Al Avila that the team is looking to trim salary to indicate the team is rebuilding. Could we be reading this all wrong?
The Detroit Tigers have spent heavily in the last number of years, attempting to win a World Series for their owner, Mike Ilitch, who will be in his 25th year of ownership with the Tigers in 2017, and at age 87 would badly like to win a title before he passes.
Ilitch notably did not invest in the team heavily until they were able to get a new stadium, Comerica Park, in 2000 with over 60% of the facility funded by Ilitch himself. At that point, he put money into the team in a way he hadn’t before, and the results came in 2006, when Ilitch lured former Tiger farmhand Jim Leyland out of a 7-year absence from the game to take over as manager and saw the team make the wild card that season and make it all the way to the World Series.
From 2006-2016, the Tigers have never lost as many as 90 games in a season, though they finished at the bottom of a stacked AL Central two times in that run. In that 11-year span, they’ve won 4 AL Central titles, been to the playoffs 5 times, been to the ALCS 4 times, and ended up in the World Series twice. However, their success has not brought home an elusive championship.
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With the 2016 season finishing 8 games out of first place and missing the playoffs after major investments in players like Justin Upton, Jordan Zimmermann, and Francisco Rodriguez, the Tigers’ GM came out and discussed trimming salary this offseason, and it led to the media immediately discussing which of the star players in Detroit would be traded. Would Miguel Cabrera finish his Hall of Fame career elsewhere? Would Justin Verlander pitch for another organization? Would Upton and Zimmermann, just one year after signing long-term deals, be moved to create financial space?
I truly think we’ve all been looking at the wrong spots, and the Cameron Maybin trade to the Angels shows it. We’ll start with a look at the payroll for 2017…